• Follow us on Twitter @buckeyeplanet and @bp_recruiting, like us on Facebook! Enjoy a post or article, recommend it to others! BP is only as strong as its community, and we only promote by word of mouth, so share away!
  • Consider registering! Fewer and higher quality ads, no emails you don't want, access to all the forums, download game torrents, private messages, polls, Sportsbook, etc. Even if you just want to lurk, there are a lot of good reasons to register!

2018-2019 Ohio State Men's Basketball (Official Thread)

Keeping in mind that I think we had a good season for the current players here goes.

These percents are ok as far as they go but keep in mind that they are only percents of a team that finished in the lower half of the B10. I think half of next years team could be supplanted by incoming talent. We had no one player on the team who was consistent the whole year. So for next year I have to ask 1. will we have a proven ball handler? 2. Will we have a center who can play the position? ( It isn't Kaleb if he can't stay in the game), and 3.
Will we have anyone who will be a continuously good scorer at the 2,3,or 4 position?
There are threads in this forum with information that might answer your questions :biggrin:
 
Upvote 0
Going into this season I thought we were probably 8th or 9th in the conference and likely on the wrong side of the bubble. There were times (specifically when Kaleb was out) that this season was even uglier than I imagined it would be, but overall I think all the frosh besides Ledee got good playing time experience and hopefully learned some things to work on for next season and just making the Dance and actually winning a game is an exceeding of my expectations for this incredibly limited roster. Also didn't foresee the B1G being quite as good/deep as it ended up being so in some ways we also exceeded my expectations for conference performance--in that if I had known the conference was going to be this good and known about Luther's extreme slump, Woods' struggles during conference play, Young's injury, Kaleb's suspension... yeah, I might have expected an even worse conference record.

Glad to see Woods finish his career on a high note and directly help this team achieve what he was hoping for when he transferred here--a tourney berth, and on top of that he really helped us beat a very good ISU team. Got nice flashes here and there from all three of Luther, Duane, and Justin this season. Happy to see, after almost two seasons, Jallow seemingly finding his niche again. Andre is what he is but fortunately what he is is considerably better than what he was his first two years: he's a solid defender, better rebounder than he was, and now an occasional scorer. He's limited and he turns it over too much, but he's a valuable part of the rotation. And Kaleb solidified his importance to this team; news flash, he is very important. Now hopefully he's got the costly youthful mistakes out of his system.

I think the new guys we're adding are going to improve the overall quality depth but I'm not sure you're going to see huge impacts on the surface. We won't miss bad CJ, but we will miss good CJ. We won't miss the Keyshawn from the majority of the conference season, but we will miss non-con Key and end-of-season Key. Walker barely assisted the ball at FSU and was a streaky scorer. DJ Carton will be a true frosh who is not a great outside shooter. I think our overall guard play is going to be better, but only if Luther and Duane make strides. It's not going to be a wholesale improvement just based on adding the new guys. I don't think Zo is going to play a lot next season, honestly, but I do think Liddell--if not a starter--will really bolster the quality of our depth at the 3 and the 4.

Really, I think next season overall is going to look a lot like this season, but hopefully with a bit more upside and consistency (especially if we avoid things like bad injuries and suspensions). I think the B1G is going to be brutal again but I do think we will end up with a somewhat better conference record and I don't think we're going to have many non-con losses. As for the Dance, well, that's a crap shoot. Earn a top 2 seed and S16 should probably be the minimum expectation (but it bears mentioning that #1 overall seed Duke and 2-seed Tenn both escaped the Round of 32 by the skin of their teeth yesterday), but anything less than that and God only knows. We had a MUCH better team last season and this season we won exactly as many games in the Dance as that one did.
 
Upvote 0
i think anyone who looked at this roster rationally before the season recognized the limits on talent. as i stated many times before, plenty of fans didn't give kbd, tate, and williams the credit they deserved and assumed that continuing success in the the top half of the conference would be more or less a given. and unless you're returning pretty much every key player, it's just so darn hard to predict a season.

the above is why i think any overall summation of this team and this season should key in on how the team progressed as the season went along. did we get better and did we stay cohesive? was the team still "buying in" in february and march? these are things not necessarily reflected by wins, losses, and conference position.

perhaps the biggest positive takeaway from this season is not that we made the tournament or won a game in the tournament. for me, by far the biggest positive takeaway is that during a rebuilding/transition season where there were multiple question marks in october, where great doubts formed in january, where everything felt uneasy from mid-january on, and where we faced a major test upon losing our star player for a stretch in march, the team remained bonded and focused. in my opinion, the season had little to do with record and much, much more to do with chemistry between the players as well as between the players and the staff. this season wasn't about the dog in the fight but instead the fight in the dog.

anyway, as far as records go, understand that we were 2 games out of 6th... but also 2 games out of 12th. this game is just too fickle to hinge success and failure on what often comes down to a possession or two over 35 games. take the 2006-07 squad, for example. great team and great season, right? well, just imagine if xavier's justin cage had made the second free throw. instead of a team that's known for a thrilling run to the title game, that osu team becomes an uber-talented punchline that choked in the second round.

this season? a couple bounces here, a couple shots there, and we finish ahead of only northwestern. i'd rather not declare this season a success or failure based on an indiana game where we trailed with under 2 go, trailed psu with under 2 to go, and depended on bucknell missing a last-second shot.
Man I watched some of the replay of the SD St game recently on BTN, it just magnified how good KBD was in comparison to the guys now. KBD could seemingly effortlessly nail shot after shot, dude was lethal. There was no one even close to him on the roster this year in terms of scoring ability.
 
Upvote 0
So congrats to OSU on scheduling the most cupcakes in the B1G? It would be funny if it weren't true.

It is unbecoming for a program the level OSU aspires to be at to continually substitute guarantee games or tournaments at the Schott of glorified guarantee games for actually meaningful nonconference tournaments.
Like most other programs do not. Except maybe for the real Blue Bloods. Maybe once our team becomes competitive again you will start seeing a change.. We shall see.
 
Upvote 0
So congrats to OSU on scheduling the most cupcakes in the B1G? It would be funny if it weren't true.
i think this may be what is actually referred to as "begging the question." maybe you are right. maybe you are wrong. i don't know. regardless, would you mind compiling the research to arrive at such a conclusion? thanks.

also, the aforementioned 12 schools come from 7 different conferences. i'm not sure what singling out osu and the big ten has to do with it.
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0
i think this may be what is actually referred to as "begging the question." maybe you are right. maybe you are wrong. i don't know. regardless, would you mind compiling the research to arrive at such a conclusion? thanks.

also, the aforementioned 12 schools come from 7 different conferences. i'm not sure what singling out osu and the big ten has to do with it.
I singled out the B1G precisely because that is the conference I had already done the research on, I guess you didnt read my posts about this 2 years ago. Maybe they were on the now-defunct Schott board. I did omit 2009-2010 because I believe 2010-2011 was the clear start of OSU's nonconference schedule tanking era, but I am confident that if you include this upcoming season and count even back to 2010, OSU will still lead the B1G in terms of guarantee type home games with no return game of any kind. Essentially what OSU does is replace a legitimate tournament with guarantee games or a sham tournament including what amounts to guarantee games and call it the Buckeye Classic or something similar, which is a ridiculous slap in the face to fans who want to see a competitive tournament.
 
Upvote 0
Back
Top